Pitching for Business

Pitching To Win New Business

Why should a potential client pick you and your company to work with them as opposed to another contender?

Let's face it, most people and their businesses are selling something similar, if not identical, to a service or product available right down the street.

Sure we all think we have unique selling points, better software, a better price, a more enticing deal and so on, but in truth, no one has to buy from us.

In fact, when you start to look at winning new business, people are not entirely rational about their decisions to buy.

If you look at your own behaviour when shopping (or your partner's or your family's or your friends' for that matter) you'll see that people sometimes buy on a whim, or for no obviously logical reason at all.

Well, the same is true when one company is 'buying' the services of another.

Increasingly, more and more of us are being asked to do the pitching for business as part of our job as a professional.

And guess what?

As a professional, the first place we tend to go is to dust off our well-prepared pitch presentations and use those.

And so does everyone else!

Business Pitching Skills

So what can you do to differentiate yourself and your offer from all the others?

You could do worse than going right back to basics: 'It's You They Buy'

This means putting time and effort into creating empathy between you and your client, getting to know something about them, doing a little self disclosure (letting slip something about yourself that's not strictly necessary), listening and creating the sense that you actually have time to spend rather than a product to sell.

All these business pitching skills will set you apart from those who have come to deliver a 'well-prepared pitch'.

Some of your pitching preparation time is actually better spent reducing the length of your prepared presentation so that you can spend more time on introductions and the question and answer part of the pitch.

These are the parts of the pitch which are more likely to be spontaneous and where your personality has a chance to shine through.

Always remember when pitching for business, we buy people first; when we've bought the person we're almost guaranteed to buy the product.